Losing his father at the age of 16 shaped the life of Browns coach Eric Mangini.
Embracing players such as Browns fullback Lawrence Vickers, head coach Eric Mangini hopes to live up to the standards of his late father, Carmine. "I will be a success. I will not take life for granted. I will be the man that you want me to be," Mangini says in thinking about his father, who passed away when Eric was 16.• Charity game remains important to Mangini
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- You're Eric Mangini, and it was a few months after your father died. You were 16, standing in front of the bathroom mirror -- and the tears began to rolling down your cheeks.
You cried and cried and cried.
You thought about Carmine Mangini, who died at the age of 56. One moment, he was playing racquetball with your brother. The next second, he was down.
And dead.
No warnings. No complaints. Nothing.
Just gone.
"Life can change in an instant," you tell a few close friends. "One day, everything is normal. He worked for the electric company. He fixed things around the house -- the man could fix anything -- he supported the five children, and mom raised the kids and took care of the house."
But at 16, it was just you and your Mom at your home in Hartford. The other four kids were grown and gone.
You are now 39 and the head coach of the Cleveland Browns. You think about that morning in the mirror. About the tears. About how you made your father a promise: "I will be a success. I will not take life for granted. I will be the man that you want me to be."
There are times when you think about watching pro football on television with your father, the loyal New York Giants fan who loved Bill Parcells and Bill Belichick.
You wish your father would have been able to see you on the same coaching staff as those men. You wish that your father could watch you today, with the Browns.
On the day your father died, you were working at a hospital, pushing patients in wheelchairs to and from the X-ray room. Your father was rushed to a different hospital.
By the time you got there, he was dead.
"No closure," you still think today. "No more chances to say I love you. No more times to say what he meant to you and the family."
Overcoming the grief
Your high school coach, Graham Martin, received a call from a member of your family after your father died. He was told that you "wanted to quit football, quit everything."
He went to see you. He doesn't remember much about it, other than the pain on your face, the ache in your heart.
Later, you became very close to your coach. You'd babysit his children. You went to the beach with his family. His home became your home. You have never forgotten what Martin did for you, how he was a giving person like your father.
You know that your father is proud of you. He would have loved to have been at your high school graduation, when you were third in your class academically -- and received awards for wrestling and football.
You are thankful for your Uncle Frank -- your dad's brother -- who really did come to the games, who talked to you and listened to you.
You once saw a picture of your father as high school football player carrying the ball over the goal line for Weaver High. The helmet was leather, no chin strap. You can see that nothing was going to stop your father from scoring that touchdown.
It was from a Thanksgiving Day game in 1956. Carmine Mangini had two touchdowns that day.
Your friend, John Cancian, remembers being at your house and watching your father wrestling with you and your friends on the floor. Later, he said you grew up like your dad, you'd wrestle with your buddies.
Cancian loves to talk about the time you had him immobilized with one arm around his head, then grabbed the remote with the other arm and changed a channel on the TV.
"Eric is a lot like his dad," Cancian tells people.
Service to others matters
As a teenager in Hartford, Conn., Eric Mangini reflected his father's determination to succeed and mesh with friends of all ethnicities.Your father often said, "We need to give back."
Carmine Mangini did it quietly. He held clothing drives at his workplace and in the neighborhood. He took what he collected to the local homeless shelter.
He took his family to the shelter where he had cookouts for the men. He saved his money, working overtime, to buy socks and razors and underwear and shaving cream for the men and the shelter.
He didn't just drop the stuff off, he hung around and talked to the guys. He treated them with respect.
One day, you were walking out of Hartford Stadium. Your father spotted a homeless man sitting on the curb, shivering. Your father took off his coat, walked over to the man and handed it over.
"I can get another jacket," your father told you.
No big deal to him, but a powerful memory for you.
It's why you and your family started the Carmine & Frank Mangini Foundation, to honor your father and uncle. It does more than hold a football camp at Bulkeley High, your alma mater in Hartford.
The foundation also gives out laptop computers each year to students headed to college who have demonstrated academic and extracurricular (not just sports, but drama, etc.) achievement and need some financial help. The foundation also awards grants to teachers for special projects.
One year, the foundation paid for bus service to the Hartford city schools so they could transport ninth-graders and coaches to games. Until that happened, they were ready to cancel freshman football.
Your brother in-law, Harry Bellucci, says that at the camp, you do everything from talk to the kids to pick up the trash to pass out the hamburgers. He says you "are a lot like your dad, a good listener who wants to know other people's stories."
Your dad knew that sports often helps kids stay in school. Without school, kids have no chance in life.
You also know what school meant to you, how your high school helped you see the world differently.
Your high school coach Graham Martin tells everyone, "Eric has never forgot where he came from. He's just like his dad -- generous."
Childhood of many colors
If you're Eric Mangini, you know that most people would be shocked if they ever saw your high school in Hartford's inner city.
Many of your Browns players think you went to a prep school and think you are faking it when you talk about listening to Tupac and other rappers from the late 1980s. But those rappers were your soundtrack at Bulkeley High. The school was only 11 percent white. Most of the students were Latino and African-American.
One of your best friends on the team was Pepe. You both nearly fought in practices, yet he respected you.
A few friends told you, "Man, Pepe is trouble. He's with the Park Street Posse."
You said, "He's OK with me."
But Pepe did get into some serious scrapes. He did jail time. Not long after you graduated from high school, you saw Pepe. He said he was straight, doing it the right away. Two weeks later, they found him dead, shot in the back of the head.
Bellucci, your brother in-law, remembers that you had a small pool at your house. He talks about how "all different colors and tribes of kids" would show up on a hot day to swim.
You saw your classmates go both good and bad. Some to college, some to jail, some to the cemetery before their 21st birthday. You think about the wasted lives, the lack of opportunities, the hopeless hearts that plagued too many at your old high school.
Your high school coach says that the area around the school was "gang-infested" when you were there. Graham Martin coached at Bulkeley from 1971-2003. He remembers you as a "coach on the field."
He talks about how you pounded opponents, playing offensive guard, middle linebacker and special teams. He insists you were on the field "all 48 minutes, every play."
You don't talk about it, but your friend John Cancian says, "Eric is in the Connecticut High School football Hall of Fame, he was that good. He could really hit people."
An inspiration that lasts
There are times when you wish some players -- dating back to your high school team right up to the current Browns -- could have had a father like Carmine Mangini.
They need to see a man who came from an Italian family, but whose parents insisted the children speak English. It was how you moved ahead, just as your father joined the Navy, then came home, and started at the bottom with the electric company in Hartford.
Your dad believed there were no shortcuts; hard work was the game changer in most lives. So the Mangini kids raked leaves, shoveled snow and cut lawns for money using hand mowers.
They knew that when Dad came home, they'd better not be staring at the television set. There was homework to be finished, chores to be done, or at least go outside and play.
You still marvel at how your father worked his way up to middle management, how he would win the company sales contests so the family could have a new television. One year, he convinced the local Burger King to buy special light bulbs for its Hartford area locations. It was a huge sale, one that surprised even his bosses.
"Don't be afraid to dream big," your father said. "Then work hard for it."
He was not a man who hit his children. A stare, a scowl, a few harsh words were enough to keep things in line. He also wasn't afraid to hug his children, to encourage them, to say it was their turn to go to college, to move the family forward.
Your father believed in "Doing the right thing, the right way."
He left enough life insurance so that your mother and you could survive economically after he died. He inspired your mother, Nancy, to go back to college and earn an art degree at the age of 70. He whispers to you to give back.
"He has been gone a long time," you tell friends. "But he's never left us."